As a genre that has existed since the nineteenth century, crime fiction is popularly confused with detective fiction, although scholars of the genre discern nuances in the usage of the terms. In the traditional history, crime fiction in English stems from Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story, “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), featuring C Auguste Dupin (Priestman 2). However, according to Ian A. Bell, the history of crime writing in English can be traced back to the publication of seemingly “true narratives” of criminal lives and their “(often fabricated) last confessions” which were generically known as the Newgate Calendar in the eighteenth century (7). Later, a body of fiction which chronicled the exploits of popular robbers, murderers, and bandits grew extremely popular between the 1830s and 1860s; today this narrative type is referred to as the Newgate novel. According to Ernest Mandel’s analysis of crime fiction in relation to the evolution of capitalism, the literature eulogising roguery eventually transformed into detective fiction by the end of the nineteenth century and the bandit was replaced by the rational detective in the protagonist’s role because of the strengthening of the bourgeois social order (8-9).
The Newgate Calendar and the Newgate novel cannot be classified as narratives of detection since they foreground transgressive behaviour and the corporeal punishments meted out to criminals by the legal system. In addition, Priestman points out that they lacked the “‘textual space’ for the figure of the detective” (3). The first English story which valourised the prowess of the detective was Poe’s “Murders”. The detective story depicted crimes against individual property and persons that were solved conclusively by a detective. Famous successors to the pattern established by Poe were Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. Due to its popularity, the nineteenth-century British detective story established a formula — the progression from the reporting of crime to its solution via the genius of the detective — that eventually became stereotyped.
In America the detective story flourished in the form of a variant known as hard-boiled fiction, which featured a professional detective agent who was not averse to relying on violence to solve the cases entrusted by clients. By the second half of the twentieth century fictional writings about crime evolved into variants such as the police procedural, the spy thriller, the crime thriller, and metaphysical detective fiction. Other subgenres include, but are not limited to, fiction featuring feminist, homosexual, African American and Native American detectives. Fictional crime writing has also established its presence in postcolonial nations by featuring detectives with national or regional identities who investigate crimes that are relatable to national audiences.
Charles J. Rzepka highlights the need to differentiate between detective fiction and crime fiction since perceptions of crime and social order have evolved substantially since the nineteenth century. According to Rzepka, crime fiction can be understood as the “voluminous umbrella” term for multiple, overlapping categories of crime writing with each offering particular perceptions of crime, its causes, and its solvability (2). Peter Messent explains detective fiction as a narrative of crime which builds tension till the moment the detective reveals the identity of the culprit (33). On the other hand, crime fiction is the appropriate term to refer to a range of fictional crime writing which introspects on social order and therefore has the capacity to function as “reflective investigations into the state of contemporary society” (Messent 34). While crime fiction could include the triangle of crime, detective, and the guilty, it is more concerned with discerning the social causes of crime. Through this trait crime fiction suggests that crime cannot be contained.
Although crime fiction has been in circulation in India since the nineteenth century, publishers today promote the ‘newness’ of the genre, relegating its Indian history to a “side-note”, as Neele Meyer points out (122). A colonial import, Indian crime fiction first took root as detective stories in commercial Bengali publications for children. In its earliest phase, Bengali detective fiction consisted of direct translations of English detective stories. Shatarupa Sinha explains that Bengali detective fiction evolved into a genre for adult readers very gradually (106). Most of the detectives were modelled closely on the iconic Sherlock Holmes, whose popularity owed much to his keen scientific observation and encyclopaedic knowledge. Since the publication of much nineteenth-century Bengali detective fiction coincided with the release of the Holmes stories in Britain, Sinha suggests that such mimicking might have been an ingenious marketing strategy (107). According to Francesca Orsini, the blind adoption of Englishness should be interpreted as Bengal’s assimilation of colonial modernity and its acceptance of colonial structures and social hierarchy (436).
Hindi detective fiction was known as jasusi upanyas, but the term was also applied to adventure thrillers. Orsini places nineteenth-century Hindi detective fiction as part of “a more general trend: the growth of a commercial literature of entertainment which was part of, and sustained, an entertainment industry comprising theatre, songs and music” (447). Detective fiction in Hindi was discontinuous with the Bengali oeuvre, especially since it featured detectives who functioned independently of colonial institutions of law and order. Orsini interprets this disregard as the Hindi heartland’s “own trajectory of adaptation to the colonial regimes” (436). Often, the crimes under investigation connoted the social flux triggered by colonisation and modernity.
In an analysis of early-twentieth-century Urdu detective fiction Markus Daechsel underscores that the stories were actually an amalgamation of indigenous adventure narratives (the dastan) with the formal features of the English detective story (211). Daechsel highlights that publishers treated the genre as a primarily commercial endeavour which was evident in the marketing and packaging of the books designed to catch public attention at the lowest cost possible (206). The stories were popular among the urban youth because they provided a vicarious outlet for the young readers’ individual aspirations which were prohibited by the religious and traditional codes of behaviour in early-twentieth-century India. Just the act of reading detective fiction was considered a fashionable break from tradition since readers perceived the genre “as a marker of sophistication” (Daechsel 222).
Towards the end of the twentieth century, the popularity of regional crime fiction was challenged by the introduction of cable TV entertainment. Hindi detective fiction was at its zenith in the 1980s when the advent of cable television destabilised its popularity. Coupled with the changes initiated by globalisation, Indian readers today are consciously shifting towards English texts, fiction and nonfiction. This transition could have been motivated by the social capital that English signifies, since fluency in the language somehow promises readers that upward social mobility is achievable. Hence, Akriti Mandhwani connects the decrease in the conspicuous consumption of Hindi crime fiction to the lifestyle changes demanded by globalisation: “the new culture of belonging dictates that a reader might as well read a popular, and most importantly, English novel than a popular Hindi one.”
The earliest English crime fiction centring on India could be Philip Meadows Taylor’s fictionalised account of a criminal in Confessions of a Thug (1839). India is an important presence in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) too as the mystery in the plot stems from the theft of a precious stone which was originally placed on the idol of a Hindu deity. The immense popularity of Taylor’s Confessions laid the foundation for the canonical spy novel based on the British Raj: Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). The Mysterious Traders (1915) by S. Mukherjee, S. K. Chettur’s Bombay Murder (1940), and Kamala Sathianadhan’s Detective Janaki (1944) are early crime novels in English written by Indians. H. R. F. Keating, a British crime novelist, wrote a series of novels featuring the humble Inspector Ghote. The first Inspector Ghote novel, The Perfect Murder (1964), won the prestigious Golden Dagger Award. While Keating’s novels are situated in India, his description of the nation was mostly second hand; i.e., he sourced information from friends who had visited India, TV shows, movie clips and newspaper articles. Regardless of the several discrepancies in Keating’s description of India, the Inspector Ghote series is one of the most popular representations of Indian crime fiction in English.
Therefore, while publishers and reviewers highlight Indian crime fiction in English as a direct descendant of English crime fiction, contemporary Indian crime fiction is not a novelty and it emerged from the contexts of capitalism and the commercialisation of entertainment that also nurtured the development of detective fiction in colonial India. These continuities are not emphasised even by contemporary authors who project their works as part of a global current; for example, authors Ashok Banker and Kalpana Swaminathan allude to British crime fiction in their novels.
Today, the term Indian crime fiction in English is applicable to the work of Indian authors residing in the nation (such as Anita Nair and Kalpana Swaminathan). In addition, it is also used to describe writing by diasporic Indians (such as Kishwar Desai) and that of authors who are partly of Indian origin and based outside the nation (such as Sujatha Massey). The works of foreign-born authors settled in India (for instance, Zac O’Yeah) are also categorised as Indian crime fiction in English. So too, is fiction written by authors who are not Indian by birth or citizenship but have great interest in situating their works in the nation (for example, the novels of Tarquin Hall). The commonalities binding this vast corpus of writing are the Indian milieux of the plots, the frequent references to Indian social norms, traditions, lifestyles and popular culture, and the cast of characters who are mostly Indian in terms of origin and residence.
In the twenty-first century, Indian crime fiction in English is among the new genres of Indian fiction which have emerged post-liberalisation. These works are referred to as genre fiction because of their allusion and/or adherence to certain formal and plot-based conventions which distinguish them from other types of fiction. Traditionally, genre is a term applied to differentiate various types of narration (such as the short story, the novel, and drama). Another usage of the term is in reference to the repetition of motifs within certain narrative modes. Such an application has emerged in modern times with the mass production of fiction which is oriented towards particular readerships. Thus, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay et. al. emphasise the usage of the term genre fiction for fiction which is a “collection of motifs” and/or which is “produced by new ways of publication and distribution” as part of the “mass cultural genre system” (“Indian Genre Fiction”).
Crime fiction and other Indian genre fiction in English– such as mythology fiction, campus fiction, chick lit – are also referred to as “Indian ‘commercial fiction’ in English” by Suman Gupta, since their publication is dependent on an estimated “profitable career within the Indian market” (46). This market-based fiction is distinguished from ‘literary’/ ‘serious’ Indian English fiction with the latter gaining international visibility, critical recognition, and academic acclaim, while commercial fiction addresses a national audience and is deemed undeserving of attention by literary critics and the academia. Gupta elaborates on this differentiation: “Literary fiction is the respectable face of Indian literature in English abroad and at home, while commercial fiction is the gossipy café of Indian writing in English at home” (“Indian ‘Commercial Fiction’”47).
The tendency to view Indian crime fiction in English as a primarily commercial genre should be explained in relation to India’s economic liberalisation. In 1991, the Indian government under Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao ushered in a series of neoliberal economic reforms which facilitated foreign direct investment in various industries. Under the Nehruvian economic model the publishing sector was dominated by Indian establishments; popular Indian fiction in English was largely underacknowledged since “India was generally perceived not to have a large enough readership for English popular fiction” (Meyer 104). Today, however, Indian publishers (such as Rupa, Roli Books, and Aleph Book Company) compete with international publishing houses like Penguin Random House, and Harper Collins. International publishers have considerably regulated and moulded the titles that are produced in the Indian market by encouraging the publication of formats that have reaped success in Western markets. Interestingly, editors’ and publishers’ opinions take precedence and often publishers gauge popular taste before seeking a writer who can deliver according to market demands (Gupta, “Indian ‘Commercial Fiction’” 47). Hence, Indian genre fiction in English is visualised and presented as a commodity, rather than as an output of individual, artistic creativity.
The readers of post-millennial Indian genre fiction are young urban middle-class professionals who are sufficiently proficient in English. They could be residents of small towns for whom English fiction provides a gateway to social mobility. The targeted readership also consists of city youth who actively participate in the consumerist lifestyle enabled by the neoliberalist economy. Giraj M. Sharma describes these readers as “jumping up and down the aisles at a bookstore or browsing websites to pick up books that they want to read, books that are written for them” (45).
An aggressive economic logic underpins the contemporary Indian publishing scenario resulting in the promotion of marketable authors and genres. Publishers have introduced novel methods of marketing, and the corporate practice of “[a]dvance launches … organising events and festivals” (Gupta, Contemporary Literature 65) to launch new works and authors is a favoured tactic. Liberalisation has ensured a regular inflow of international bestsellers and fiction by internationally acclaimed writers due to which
[c]ertain sorts of texts simply do not have the opportunity to surface for the gauging of informed readerships; certain sorts of texts are pre-framed in a manner that makes them unavoidably visible before they are read in any meaningful fashion; and certain sorts are pushed on readers in so concerted and predetermined a fashion … that their readerships are circumscribed in advance. (Gupta, Globalization 161)
Hence, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games has gained more visibility via research, awards, book fairs, and media promotion than most other Indian crime fiction; however, very few Indian crime novels in English are distributed internationally. Meyer reasons that Indian authors with a national readership are unwilling to project India in an exotic fashion and this could explain the lack of interest by the international market (9). Another factor is the power imbalance in the publishing sector which demands non-canonical authors from the Global South to pass several levels of gatekeeping by the “centers of literary production” in the North before reaching the global market (Meyer 12). Ed Christian elaborates that regional detective fiction from former colonies receive scant attention, especially if it is not in English. Moreover, English detective fiction from the postcolonial world is not promoted globally unless publishers are certain of their profitability. In addition, publishers are wary of the quality of detective fiction from the non-western parts of the world since the genre has traditionally been associated with low literary credentials (Christian 5).
Interestingly, the list of Indian fiction in English distributed internationally is starkly different from the stories preferred and read by the national audience (Meyer 10). This results in a “circulatory matrix” of “Indian texts by Indian authors being produced in India for Indian readers” (Gupta, “Indian ‘Commercial Fiction’” 50). Indian crime fiction in English falls into this circuit, as it is circumscribed by market requirements and the homogenising practices of globalisation.
Two novels that pioneered the recent output of Indian crime fiction in English after liberalisation were Ashok Banker’s Ten Dead Admen, The Iron Bra and Murder and Champagne in 1993. Indian Crime fiction has attracted even ‘serious/literary’ authors; for example, in 2003, Shashi Deshpande published a short story, “Anatomy of a Murder”, which ruminates on the bizarre motives of murder. From 2012 onwards, Anita Nair has written three crime novels in the Inspector Gowda series. Starting with Cut Like Wound (2012) Gowda’s investigations unravel the contradictions between Bangalore’s cosmopolitanism and its underworld of sex trafficking, prostitution, and illegal gambling. Another established name is Vikram Chandra whose short story “Kama” and novel Sacred Games (2006) feature police officer Sartaj Singh. Sahitya Akademi awardee, Jerry Pinto published Murder in Mahim (2017) which directs attention to the prevalence of conventional attitudes towards homosexuality in contemporary Mumbai. Shashi Tharoor’s Riot can be classified as a crime novel since the mystery of Priscilla Hart’s murder is central to the narrative. Prominent illustrator and cartoonist Ravi Shankar Etteth’s The Tiger by the River (2002) is a historical crime novel, while The Village of Widows (2004) features Deputy Police Commissioner Anna Khan. Khan reappears in Etteth’s The Gold of their Regrets (2009) to investigate a murder which took place during World War II.
Sujatha Massey gained international attention with the publication of The Salaryman’s Wife (1997), which debuted the amateur sleuth Rei Shimura who is of mixed white and Japanese ancestry. In 2019, Massey published the first novel in the Perveen Mistry series which is set in early-twentieth-century India. The sleuth Perveen has a degree in law and assists her father at his law firm. The first novel of the series, The Widows of Malabar Hill (2019) won several awards including the Mary Higgins Clark Award and the Agatha Award. Following in the Christie tradition, the Perveen novels are murder mysteries devoid of explicitly violent content. However, the series details Perveen’s personal heartbreaks due to the stigma she has to face as a divorcee. The crimes that Perveen investigates, together with, her personal crises draw attention to women’s limited agency in colonial India.
The Simran Singh novels by Kishwar Desai feature an amateur sleuth who is a social worker by vocation. Through the series Desai exposes the deep-rooted sexism across contemporary India: Witness the Night (2010) unravels the persistence of female foeticide; Origins of Love (2012), exposes the unethical aspect of commercial surrogacy; The Sea of Innocence (2013) shows Simran investigating the gang rape and murder of a tourist in Goa.
Kalpana Swaminathan is a practising paediatrician whose crime series, beginning with Cryptic Death and Other Stories (1997), features a retired police officer called Lalli. A few novels in the Lalli oeuvre are The Page Three Murders (2006), The Gardener’s Song (2007), The Monochrome Madonna (2010), The Secret Gardener (2013), and Greenlight (2017). Lalli’s age, sharp intelligence, and social awareness are reminiscent of Miss Marple, while her penchant for reading and solitude echo the Holmesian tradition. Almost all Lalli novels are murder mysteries situated in the domestic space. Unlike Christie, however, Swaminathan forthrightly blames regressive middle-class attitudes for much of the gender victimisation happening in Indian homes.
Bengaluru-based Zac O’ Yeah, of Swedish origin, uses the city as the backdrop of his series featuring Hari Majestic, a former tout who currently earns a living as a conman. The first novel in the Hari Majestic series was Mr Majestic! The Tout of Bengaluru (2012). This was followed by Hari, a Hero for Hire (2015) and Tropical Detective (2018). O’ Yeah has also authored a police novel titled Once upon a Time in Scandinavistan (2010). O’ Yeah’s novels incorporate the traits of Swedish noir crime fiction, and his detectives, Hari and Herman Barsk, are self-deprecatory men who resignedly accept the recurrent nature of crime.
Vish Puri, who appears in a series authored by the British writer Tarquin Hall, is a middle-aged Punjabi detective who lives in Delhi and runs an agency called Most Private Investigators. A few of the titles — The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken (2012), The Case of the Love Commandos (2013), The Case of the Reincarnated Client (2019) — align the novels with the stereotypical exoticisation of India, its culture and food. Moreover, the eponymous detective’s weakness for rich food, his rotund figure and his amicable nature can be interpreted as clichéd representations of the Punjabi community. However, unlike Keating, Hall is quite familiar with Indian culture having worked as a journalist in South Asia, and his knowledge of the region’s society and politics is discernible through the ‘cases’ that Vish Puri investigates.
Smitha Jain’s Piggies on the Railway (2010) shows Kasthuri, a former police officer who currently owns a professional detective service, tracing a missing Bollywood heroine. Piggies has been commended for redefining crime fiction using the tropes of chick lit (Varughese). Jain’s Kkrishnaa’s Confessions (2008) features Kkrishnaa who assumes the role of a sleuth as a consequence of accidentally witnessing a murder. Apart from crime novels, Jain has also published the crime stories “An Education in Murder” (2012), “The Body in the Gali” (2012) and “The Fraud of Dionysus” (2021) in the anthologies Chesapeake Crimes: This Job is Murder, Mumbai Noir and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine respectively.
The Muzaffar Jang mystery series by Madhulika Liddle is probably the most widely read historical Indian crime fiction in English. Currently, Liddle has written three novels, which are set in seventeenth-century Mughal India, as part of the series: The Englishman’s Cameo (2009), Engraved in Stone (2012) and Crimson City (2015). The detective is a young man who is reminiscent of Holmes due to his keen observational ability, intelligence and eccentricity. The Eighth Guest & Other Muzaffar Jang Mysteries (2011) is an anthology of Muzaffar’s several cases.
Ankush Saikia’s series featuring the professional detective Arjun Aurora includes Dead Meat (2015), Remember Death (2016), More Bodies will Fall (2018) and Tears of the Dragon (2023). Saikia is also the author of the thrillers The Girl from Nongrim Hills (2013) and Red River, Blue Hills (2015). Saikia weaves the milieu of the noir with that of the hard-boiled as he narrates the gruesome murder cases entrusted to Arjun (Dead Meat opens with a mutilated body in a tandoor) and recounts the complex realities of the North-East.
Anuja Chauhan’s Club you to Death (2021) introduces ACP Bhavani Singh, a maverick police officer who is quite close to retirement. The novel has been adapted as a film for OTT streaming. Chauhan’s second novel The Fast and the Dead (2023) is a mystery adhering to many of the traditions established by Christie. The Fast employs crime as a springboard to discuss issues pertinent to ‘New India,’ i.e. Islamophobia and the hyperpresence of visual media, thereby negotiating the boundaries of crime fiction and the “New India novel”; an emerging body of post-millennial Indian fiction which specifically “reflect the socio-political conditions of the country since the election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister in 2014” (Gupta “Review”).
Environmentalist and professor of Ecology Harini Nagendra is also the author of a three-part crime series which depicts Bangalore in the 1920s. The novels in order are: The Bangalore Detectives Club (2022), Murder under a Red Moon (2023) and A Nest of Vipers (2024). Nagendra’s detectives are Kaveri, a young, saree-clad, resourceful homemaker and her husband Ramu, a doctor. The Bangalore Detectives Club makes for an unconventional murder mystery because of the insights it provides into urban ecology and the Indian nationalist movement. Like Nagendra, Kiran Manral too is an environmentalist who also writes crime fiction. Manral’s oeuvre includes The Reluctant Detective (2011) and The Kitty Party Murder (2020), and a psychological thriller, Missing, Presumed Dead (2018).
British-Indian author Abir Mukherjee was awarded the CWA Endeavour Dagger for his historical crime novel A Rising Man (2016) which commences a series featuring Sam Wyndham. Wyndham formerly worked in the Scotland Yard before being deputed to Calcutta, and once in India, he finds himself underprepared for the entrenched racism in the police force. The series continues with A Necessary Evil (2017), Smoke and Ashes (2018), Death in the East (2019), and The Shadows of Men (2021). Depicting colonial India, the series documents how the nationalist movement in India challenges colonial discourse.
Vaseem Khan too is a British-Indian author who has published seven novels in the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency Series featuring Inspector Ashwin Chopra and Ganesha, an elephant calf. Starting with The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra (2015), there are six novels currently in the series. Simultaneously, Khan published another crime series featuring Persis Wadia, a Parsi female police officer who has earned the distinction of being the first female police inspector in a newly independent India. The novels — Midnight at Malabar House (2020) and Dying Day (2021) — portray the sexism Wadia has to constantly negotiate due to her unique achievement.
An interesting development in Indian crime fiction is the crime thriller which focuses on terrorism. While the crime thriller might not exhibit the typical progression from crime to its resolution, it is an acknowledged subgenre since the plot hinges on criminal transgressions, at micro or macro levels. In Vikram A. Chandra’s The Srinagar Conspiracy (2000), the protagonist Major Vijay Kaul leads an operation against an imminent terrorist attack that is timed to coincide with the American President’s visit to India. Sasi Warrier’s Night of the Krait (2008) depicts the Kashmir insurgency, and, here, Colonel Raja Menon Raja leads a team of commandos to subvert the hijacking of a train coach. Other thrillers by Warrier include Sniper (2000), The Orphan Diaries (2009), and Noordin’s Gift (2014). The chaos of Kashmir politics surfaces in Bharat Wakhlu’s Close Call in Kashmir (2010). Terrorism is once more the crux of the crisis in Mukul Deva’s The Dust will Never Settle (2012) and Lakshar (2013).
An interesting offshoot of the amateur sleuth fiction is the crime narrative which features the journalist-detective. The sleuth in Vikas Swarup’s Six Suspects (2008) is Arun Advani who is an investigative journalist. The novel is based on a true high profile murder case which received great media attention in India. Another interesting format is the crime story, or crime fiction in the shorter format. Although the genesis of fictional crime writing can be traced back to the short narrative form, the latter has been underrepresented by reviewers and print media. Delhi Noir (2009) and Mumbai Noir (2012) are part of the Akashic Noir series which anthologizes noir stories from cities across the world. The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (three volumes have been published since 2008) is significant for Indian crime fiction as it provides translations of the prolific Pattukottai Prabakar and Rajesh Kumar among others.
Blaft’s translations of Urdu author Ibne Safi’s jasoosi series with the detective duo Colonel Faridi and Captain Hameed are valuable additions to the corpus of Indian crime fiction. Ibne Safi was one of the most widely read authors of Urdu crime fiction. His jasoosi duniya featuring the aforementioned duo and the Imran series attained cult status in the 1950s across India and Pakistan. Currently, Blaft has published four tales from the Faridi-Hameed jasoosi duniya series, translated by the illustrious Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. The translations offer readers and critics an understanding of the indigenous appropriation of pulp conventions.
Despite the diversity of its subgenres and its capacity for social critique, crime fiction did not receive commensurate attention in academic circles, till recently. Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English elaborates how contemporary Indian crime fiction in English unveils the multiple untoward conditions of ‘New India’ due to which “in striving for a sense of Indianness today, people are challenged and often driven to commit the most inhumane acts” (Varughese). Since crime fiction investigates the complexities of the social structure, it has the capacity to weave counter narratives about political corruption, moral degeneration, gender inequality, casteism, and religious fundamentalism. with the main plot. One example of crime fiction’s critical examination of social norms is Kishwar Desai’s Witness the Night which documents the persistence of sex selective abortion in India, leading to female foeticide. Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Love Commandos commences with the crisis faced by a young inter-caste couple who have been forcefully separated by the girl’s family. The novel connects the lovers’ tragedy to electoral politics and a causality does not appear outlandish considering the caste-based political manoeuvres in contemporary India.
However, fictional crime writings are often considered reactionary due to their espousal of bourgeois values. The roots of European crime fiction as a distinct genre of writing in Europe lie in the visibility of the bourgeoisie, which is why Ernest Mandel attributes the genre’s origin to the intersections of “capitalism, pauperism, criminality, and primitive social revolt against bourgeois society” (10). Crime fiction has traditionally buttressed bourgeois politics, especially via the identity of the sleuth, who was presented as a member of the same social class as the readers, i.e. the middle and/or upper middle classes. The middle and upper classes are at the forefront of voicing anxieties about crime; ironically, they are statistically least likely to experience victimisation (Comaroff and Comaroff 6–7).
Indian crime fiction too has conventionally favoured a middle-class worldview, such as in the famous stories of Byomkesh Bakshi by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay and the Feluda fiction by Satyajit Ray wherein the narratives seamlessly mirror the realities of their readers. This alignment is even more apparent today as crime fiction, like other contemporary genre fiction in English, “concentrate[s] on the anxieties of the present embroiled in national politics as well as to the politics of visibility of the new Indian middle class” (Ghosh 75). Such a marked transition could be explained by the prioritisation of the Indian middle class as consumers and as representatives of “a cultural standard associated with the globalising Indian nation” in the mainstream media after liberalisation (Fernandes 2418).
This explains why most Anglophone Indian crime fiction depicts localities and scenarios that the readership would be familiar with as citizens and as consumers (Meyer 125). For example, most of Swaminathan’s Gardener’s Song takes place in an apartment complex which has only middle-class residents. Interestingly, the detective, Lalli, delivers a tirade against the residents’ rigid and archaic mindsets. Yet, such criticism can be problematic too, as in the case of the Simran Singh novels. While Desai’s Simran Singh series is fiercely anti-patriarchal, its counter-hegemonic stance is questionable due to the detective’s upper-middle-class viewpoint which dominates the narration.
The Indian English crime novel manifests harmony with middle class ideology through the social identity of the detective, the crimes being investigated and the solutions provided. Nair’s Cut Like Wound presents Inspector Gowda, a member of the middle class, with a series of murders of young men. The novel alternates between the first-person narration of a psychopath and an omniscient one which centres on the investigation. Gowda eventually discovers that the killer is the sibling of a powerful politician. A transgender, the murderer solicits young men and kills them to avenge a personal tragedy which took place in their adolescence. At the end the novel reveals that the psychopathic first-person narrator was none other than the murderer. Although the novel sheds light on the social stigma faced by the transgender community, it sensationalises their lives by highlighting the heinous nature of the murders and thereby the abnormality of the murderer. Further, Cut guides readers’ attention to Gowda’s investigative prowess, and, hence, the novel reduces the gravity of the societal and the institutional marginalisation of the third gender. According to Mandel, crime fiction is traditionally a bourgeois narrative because of its tendency to prioritise the investigation of crimes, hence dismissing crime as mysterious incidents or puzzles which test the detective’s intelligence (16). By equating crime to a puzzle which is solved by a persistent detective, the genre fails to recognise the several social and economic inequalities in the status quo which are crime conducive. In Cut, the murderer’s narration is a stark contrast to the depiction of Gowda’s investigation, particularly because of the former’s irrationality and inability to regulate their emotions. Therefore, the novel unintentionally espouses heteronormative perceptions via its treatment of transgenderism as a singular, potentially criminal aberration.
Anglophone Indian crime fiction’s representation of the middle-class perspective is a reflection of the peculiarities of New India, wherein the marginalised are being erased from dominant national discourse and culture since they are incongruent with the mainstream propaganda of ‘liberal’ India (Fernandes 2416). Leela Fernandes theorises this as the “politics of forgetting” as it is a practice of “political-discursive process”, along with “spatial politics and contestations unfolding in urban India”, that “centres on the visibility of the new Indian middle class [only]” (2416). Currently, the state and the middle class in urban India are actively involved in the spatial displacement of lower income groups and vagrants from residential premises and public spaces citing concerns of social disorder. In “The Politics of Forgetting” Fernandes explains that various state and national governments in India have increasingly sought to redesign urban public spaces to cater to and expand the consumerist lifestyle that the urban middle class have welcomed from the late twentieth century onwards. This creates a visual aesthetic which erases the visibility of the lower income groups and it encourages a spatial politics of class-based segregation which prioritises middle class requirements, since it is this demographic that is projected to underpin ‘New’ India’s capacity for gsrowth. Hence, the representational politics of Indian crime fiction in English is pertinent considering the governments’ and the media’s propaganda of “India Shining” — i.e., an India of economic growth and consumerist prosperity — which foregrounds ‘New’ India’s economic aspirations on the global scale following liberalisation, while spatially marginalising the economically disadvantaged citizens.
A fitting illustration of the genre’s social bias would be Kishwar Desai’s Origins of Love. Simran actively champions the rights of surrogates, especially since most of them are from lower income households, and thereby reveals the ugly reality of the commercial surrogacy industry. Origins focuses on the journey of one particular surrogate, Sonia, since her journey towards surrogacy exposes how politicians sustain casteism by manipulating caste identity for their own gain. Yet, although Origins details the layers of exploitation that Sonia is subjected to, it alternates between homodiegetic and omniscient narration to convey the progress in Simran’s investigation and the destinies of the surrogates respectively. Such a narrative mode empowers Simran with agency while the surrogates are subalternised since they require a mediator, i.e., the narrator, to voice their plight. This representational imbalance in Origins is an example of Anglophone Indian crime fiction’s alignment with the “politics of forgetting” and its limited depiction of alterity since the novel prioritises Simran’s upper middle-class perspectives and leaves no scope for the surrogates to voice their own experiences. It must be mentioned that the authors of Indian crime fiction in English are members of a privileged minority in terms of their education, employment and social identities. A few of them — Desai, Massey, Banker, Chandra, Khan — are part of the Indian diaspora. Their audience share or aspire to belong to the same social status. Hence, the Indian crime novel in English modifies Gupta’s aforementioned analogy of genre fiction to ‘middle class Indians talking to middle class Indians’.
The issues that Indian crime fiction in English inclines towards are harmonious with the stereotypical representation of India circulating in the international media. Political and bureaucratic corruption, poverty and inequality of resource distribution apart, Bollywood too has earned the attention of the media and the oeuvre. Other typical representations of the nation that have been adopted by the genre include religious schisms, superstitious beliefs, cricket, the spicy Indian cuisine, chaotic traffic etc. Moreover, since the narratives are in English, they target a sophisticated readership defined by their fluency in English, their awareness of western culture, the nature of their income, and the luxury to have time at their disposal to read for pleasure.
The manner in which Anglophone Indian crime fiction views the nation can be understood better through the theory of re-Orientalism. Lisa Lau and Om Prakash Dwivedi define re-Orientalism as the East’s agency of self-representation; “however this representation is not exempt from being partial and skewed, and, moreover, it is still Western-centric and postcolonial” (2). The theory of Re-Orientalism emphasises that many postcolonial authors (among others writing fiction or non-fiction about India) writing in English have inherited the West’s skewed representations of the Orient, or that they have been persuaded to mimic these colonial misrepresentations due to market pressures or for literary acclaim (8–11). Thus, they rely on narrative devices and select themes which re-exoticise the postcolonial world for consumption by a privileged national and an international audience.
While Indian crime fiction in English is intended for national consumption, it can exhibit re-Orientalist traits by participating in the stereotyping of India as a land of stark socio-cultural inequalities, corrupt governance, and the persistence of crime. A common re-Orientalist trait is postcolonial fiction’s inclination to highlight “Dark India” (Lau and Dwivedi 9), i.e., the persistence of widespread poverty, unemployment, and gender inequality which destabilise the propaganda of “India Shining.” Narratives of crime, corruption, poverty, gross socio-economic disparities, political instability, and the dominance of religious viewpoints cater to this re-Orientalist perception. Indeed, contemporary Indian crime fiction in English depicts the nation and the lives of its common citizens by promoting the assumption that the social order is criminogenic, if anything. However, individual novels within the corpus reveal variations in the depiction of India, its people, and their cultures. For instance, Sacred Games shrewdly mocks the stereotyping of India via its true villain, a Hindu spiritual guru who masterminds a plan to destroy Mumbai with the intention of igniting communal violence. Unveiling the modern manipulation of Hindu philosophy, the novel ridicules clichéd representations of India by showing the guru as a fanatic and a hypocrite.
Although, Indian crime fiction in English does not engage with issues and themes pertaining to postcolonialism (Meyer 94), the corpus is a manifestation of the condition of postcoloniality. Graham Huggan understands postcolonialism as an “anticolonial intellectualism” (6) put to work in textual and social resistance. Postcoloniality, on the other hand, provides symbolic and material value to the postcolonial condition and can thereby commercialise even the discourse of resistance (Huggan 6). The postcolonial world is converted into a commodity the market value of which is determined by its exotic capacity. Postcoloniality can result in the commodification of native products, utilities and services in external markets where they are sold as exotica, detached from their functional value and their authentic contexts, as part of the “aesthetics of decontextualisation” (Huggan 16). This is the “postcolonial exotic” which Huggan places at the intersection of the anticolonial resistance of postcolonialism and the capitalisation of this otherness by the global market (28), and it is mostly consumed by an international market.
The exoticisation of the postcolonial world is a characteristic of Indian crime fiction in English, despite its national audience. While the genre consciously rejects association with postcolonialism, its counterpositional backdrop of “India Shining” and “Dark India” and its disposition to re-Orientalise suggest its participation in postcoloniality both as a product of the postcolonial exotic and as a discursive paradigm of exoticisation. Titles like Sacred Games, The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken, The Widows of Malabar Hill, Krishnaa’s Konfessions and Death of a Lesser God are a few examples of the exoticisation of contemporary India, albeit for a primarily internal consumption.
Despite Indian crime fiction in English’s manifold status (as social critique, as a record of readers’ perceptions, as a product of neoliberal capitalism, as neo-colonial discourse, as a re-Orientalist text), there is minimal research on the genre on these lines. This disproportionality results partly from the binary of highbrow/serious fiction versus lowbrow/ popular fiction. Popular/ Genre/ Commercial fiction was traditionally undervalued by scholars because it is overtly determined by market-driven formulae. From the latter half of the twentieth century onwards the dominance of feminism and postcolonialism, supported by the postmodernist rebuttal of distinctions between high and low literature, has sparked scholars’ interest in crime fiction. In addition, contemporary authors have found that the genre reads well as a counter- narrative of Eurocentric heteronormative patriarchal discourse. The novels of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky are the most popular of a body of feminist crime fiction which invariably criticises patriarchal norms at the familial, societal, and institutional levels. Their detectives are fiercely feminist individuals who challenge traditional gender roles through their professional and personal lives. A similar strain can be discerned in the novels of Desai, Massey, Swaminathan, and Jain. Likewise, in the English-speaking world, crime fiction featuring non-European detectives and detectives with hyphenated ethnic identities who undermine white masculinist perceptions have increasingly been published since the 1980s. In the Global South, too, authors have reworked and appropriated the genre and its conventions to suit indigenous and national cultures. In addition, these national and diasporic authors have discovered the suitability of crime writing for shattering hegemonic notions of social order and disorder. It appears that the trend to revise the typical traits of crime fiction is a global phenomenon in order to reflect, with greater authenticity, contemporary realities consequent to globalisation and the spread of neoliberal capitalism.
In India, crime fiction is yet to gain acceptance from the academia at curricular and research levels. While individual courses on detective fiction are now being offered across higher educational institutions, the canon of Indian literature introduced to students continues its neglect of Indian crime fiction, thereby indicating the academia’s dismissal of popular fiction as literature that exists on the margins. However, Emma Dawson Varughese’s recent studies of Indian crime writing in Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English (2013) and Genre Fiction of New India: Post-Millennial Receptions of ‘Weird’ Narratives (2017) indicate the nascent post-millennial scholarly interest in the genre due to the critical introspections it supports of India’s changed socio-economic contexts. South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations (2016) edited by Alex Tickell, Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories (2019) edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay et al, and Indian Popular Fiction: Redefining the Canon (2022) edited by Gitanjali Chawla and Sangeeta Mittal are other critical works that contribute to the analysis of Indian crime fiction. Considering the economic circumstances which led to its current visibility, Indian crime fiction in English can be studied in relation to representations of New India, re-Orientalist strategies, the ‘new’ middle class of India and consumerism, among others. Indeed, the aforementioned works voice a much-needed transition in the perception and interpretation of Indian crime fiction in English as fiction (that is emblematic) of New India. It might not be whimsical to envision a day when boundaries have been dissolved and crime writing is welcomed to the literary centre.
End Notes
1 Incidentally, the Newgate Calendar was published with the belief that the narratives would
deter the masses from criminally transgressive behaviour by instilling the populace with a
fear of the terrible punishments which would follow upon apprehension. However, the
Newgate Calendar grew in popularity for an unforeseen reason; i.e., their sensational
depiction of crime and punishment which yielded to a voyeuristic form of entertainment
among the masses. The Newgate novel was criticised for glamourising delinquency since it
presented criminals as protagonists and as victims of social conditions (Pykett 20).
2 According to Tabish Khair, Janaki is the earliest female detective to feature in Indian
English fiction (64).
3 Meera Tamaya analyses Inspector Ghote, who works in India, as a post-colonial detective
since the character undermines the bourgeois and Eurocentric traits established by Sherlock
Holmes.
4 Prabhat K. Singh refers to Vikram Chandra, Ashok Banker and Tarquin Hall, all of whom
do not reside in India (9–10), in relation to the new wave of crime fiction being read by
Indians in the twenty first century. Neele Meyer too studies Chandra and Hall in her
comparative study of contemporary Indian and Latin American crime fiction, highlighting
that the location of the publisher also determines whether a narrative can classify as Indian
crime fiction in English (20). Meyer refers to the Swedish-born, but Indian-settled Zac
O’Yeah as an “Indian writer” since his crime novels are set in contemporary India (107).
Khair details the diasporic concerns and genre refashioning in the detective novels of author
Sujatha Massey who lives in the USA. Although her Rei Shimura series features a Japanese-
American amateur sleuth solving crimes in Tokyo, Khair analyses the novels as Indian
English pulp since it is written by a “Euro-Indian” (69–71).
5 Jean and John L. Comaroff propose that the current popularity of crime narratives in
postcolonial nations can be explained in relation to citizens’ “deepest existential dilemmas
about economy and society, about politics, personhood, and ethics” triggered by globalisation
and economic liberalisation (xii–xiii). They link this attitudinal change to the implementation
of neoliberal policies across the world, and highlight that with neoliberalism, governments
have transitioned from welfare governance to pro-capitalist policies which has led to an
apprehension of increasing lawlessness and social chaos among citizens. Such a scenario
nurtures the popularity of crime stories, “[t]he more dire they are, the better”, since they
“captivate an endlessly curious populace” (51) and reflect their deepest fears.
6 In fact, the repetition of motifs attributes certain narratives with their identity. In “The
Typology of Detective Fiction” Tzvetan Todorov elucidates that fidelity to the rules of genre
is an important factor for popular types of literature. Citing an example from detective fiction,
Todorov states, “[t]he whodunit par excellence is not the one which transgresses the rules of
the genre, but the one which conforms to them . . .” (159).
7 Todorov categorises the thriller as a genre of detective fiction which was predominant in
America before and after the second World War. The thriller differs from the traditional
detective story in two ways: first, the narrative is propelled by action and secondly, the
narrator might not be cognizant of the events leading to the crime, even at the end of the plot
(161).
Works Cited
Bell, Ian. A. “Eighteenth-century Crime Writing.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime
Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 7–17.
Chattopadhayay, Bodhisattva et.al. “Indian Genre Fiction-Languages, Literatures,
Classifications.” Introduction. Indian Genre Fiction: Past and Future Histories,
edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay et al., Kindle ed., Routledge, 2019.
Christian, Ed. “Introducing the Postcolonial Detective: Putting Marginality to Work.”
Introduction. The Post-Colonial Detective, edited by Ed Christian, Palgrave-
Macmillan, 2001, pp. 1–16.
Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. Truth about Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social
Order. U of Chicago P, 2016.
Daechsel, Markus. “Zālim Ḍākū and the Mystery of the Rubber Sea Monster: Urdu Detective
Fiction in 1930s Punjab and the Experience of Colonial Modernity.” Of Matters
Modern: The Experience of Modernity in Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia,
edited by Debraj Bhattacharya, Seagull Books, 2007, pp. 204–41.
Fernandes, Leela. “The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, State Power and the
Restructuring of Urban Space in India.” Urban Studies, vol. 41, no. 12, Nov. 2004,
pp. 2415–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43197064.
Ghosh, Suchismita. “Indian Commercial Fiction: Chetan Bhagat and the Politics of the
Neoliberal Citizenry.” Indian Popular Fiction: Redefining the Canon, edited by
Gitanjali Chawla and Sangeeta Mittal, Routledge, 2022, pp. 73–86.
Gupta, Suman. Contemporary Literature: The Basics. Routledge, 2012.
—. Globalization and Literature. Polity, 2009.
—. “Indian ‘Commercial Fiction’ in English the Publishing Industry and Youth Culture.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 47, no. 5, 2012, pp. 46–53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41419848.
Gupta, Uttaran Das. “Review: The Fast and the Dead by Anuja Chauhan.” Hindustan Times,
20 Jan. 2024, hindustantimes.com/books/review-the-fast-and-the-dead-byanuja-
chauhan-101705693495456.html. Accessed 8 May 2024.
Huggan, Graham. The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Routledge, 2001.
Khair, Tabish. “Indian Pulp Fiction in English: A Preliminary Overview from Dutt to Dé.”
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol.43, no.3, Sep. 2008, pp. 59–74. Sage
Publications, doi: 10.1177/0021989408095238.
Lau, Lisa, and Om Prakash Dwivedi. Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014.
Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. U of Minnesota P,
1984.
Mandhwani, Akriti. “From the Colloquial to the ‘Literary’: Hindi Pulp’s Journey from the
Streets to the Bookshelves.” Indian Genre Fiction: Past and Future Histories, edited
by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay et al., Kindle ed., Routledge, 2019.
Messent, Peter. The Crime Fiction Handbook. John Wiley &Sons, 2012.
Meyer, Neele. Glocalizing Genre Fiction in the Global South: Indian and Latin American
Post-Millennial Crime Fiction, Published Dissertation, LMU München: Faculty for
Languages and Literatures, 2017, nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:19-243418.
Orsini, Francesca. “Detective Novels: A Commercial Genre in Nineteenth-Century North
India.” India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, edited by Stuart
Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia, Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 435–82.
Priestman, Martin. “Crime Fiction and Detective Fiction.” Introduction. The Cambridge
Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp.
1–6.
Pykett, Lynn. “The Newgate Novel and Sensation Fiction 1830-1868.” The Cambridge
Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp.
19–39.
Rzepka, Charles J. “What is Crime Fiction?” Introduction. A Companion to Crime Fiction,
edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 1–9.
Sharma, Giraj M. “The Reader has Moved on. Long Live the Consumer!” Indian Popular
Fiction: Redefining the Canon, edited by Gitanjali Chawla and Sangeeta Mittal,
Routledge, 2022, pp. 43–55.
Singh, Prabhat. K. “The Narrative Strands in the Indian English Novel: Needs, Desires and
Directions.” The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium, edited by Prabhat K.
Singh, Cambridge Scholars, 2013, pp. 1–27.
Sinha, Shatarupa. “Papyrus to Celluloid: An Insight into the Oeuvre of Bengali Detectives.”
Indian Popular Fiction: Redefining the Canon, edited by Gitanjali Chawla and
Sangeeta Mittal, Routledge, 2022, pp. 105–25.
Tamaya, Meera. “Keating’s Inspector Ghote: Post-Colonial Detective?” The Post-Colonial
Detective, edited by Ed Christian, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001, pp. 17–36.
Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A
Reader, edited by David Lodge, Longman, 1988, pp. 158–65.
Varughese, Emma Dawson. Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English.
Kindle ed., Bloomsbury, 2013.
